Tuesday, November 15, 2016

No Sleep

The first page of No Visitors #2 is an ad for The Starlight Foundation of Australia with a Nike logo superimposed over a child's forehead. The reverse page is a photocopy of a brochure asking patients to leave money to the hospitals in their wills.

This comic is littered with advertisements, but not funded by them.

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Sickness is pervasive in No Visitors. Its existence becomes something that can be used, by medical companies as a source of producing profit, by advertising firms to create good will for their brands, and by shitty people in the mall who want to make fun of someone.

Lost in each of these entities though is the person that is sick. That gap of humanity is at the heart of No Visitors #2. It makes that “object” a person and imbues them with a life, with thoughts and an attitude that just wants to tell them all to fuck off and die in a fire.

When Little pulls out his IV and sprays his food court bullies with his blood you see Little seizing the power back from the bullies in his life, from the doctors, nurses and everyone else who tries to tell him what to do.

At least in that moment...

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A KFC sponsored “art therapy” group opens the book and feels more like an ad campaign than an attempt at helping any of those involved. Little sits in a group circle feeling increasingly un-at ease with the show of corporate branding and overt racism on display, only to be told by a nurse “I don’t want to shame you…but you aren’t being very ‘recover committed’” for not appreciating KFC’s kindness.

There are moments of silence in these comics that don’t even exist in the comics themselves. Pauses in the panel to panel transitions based on moments that make you ask yourself a question you have to contemplate the second after you experience it. You don’t need a panel with Little’s eyes rolling and a word balloon with an ellipsis in it to understand how uncomforting the words nurses and doctors speak to him are; it is an inherent fact.

But it is a fact that HTML Flowers trusts the reader to understand without his explicit help, because he needs to tell you more and the page count isn’t long enough for him to explain it all to you.

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HTML Flowers vibrant colors are washed away into grayness in No Visitors #2. A few of these comics first appeared on Vice, in full color, but in this collection those colors, and the brightness they brought to Little’s surroundings are drained of their power, institutionalized and made uniform. Made grey.

These stories centralize on Little moving outside of the hospital staff. Of him interacting with other patients and other individuals, but as the backgrounds turn into a mass of grey and individuals faces become difficult to make out due to the printing process you see these outside interactions sapped of their life. The hospital takes over everything, even while binge eating in a mall food court Little is reminded of his illness by those grey toned figures sitting across from him. The colors that brought the outside world into focus are made neutral and regulated back into the world of the hospital.

It isn’t until Little is dealing solely with the hospital staff that HTML Flowers allows his line to exist on its own. It is clean and uninhibited, to a degree that forces the reader to focus in on the staff and surroundings that make up the hospital. You can see the dots in the administrators eyes.

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Nurses and doctors take on an almost adversarial role in No Visitors. They exist as workers at the impasse of interests groups; breathlessly referring to an art therapy group as “fingerlicking good” and shoving a nasal probe up Little’s nose with no regard for the violent convulsions he exhibits. That Little pops a boner during the probe only plays further into the power dynamics of these interactions, of a sub and dom existing in a seemingly care giving focused setting, that only the patient is able to fully experience and try to process.

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I spilt a beer on No Visitors #2 a few weeks ago. This seems oddly prophetic since my copy of Werewolf Jones and Sons showed up with an apology drawing from Simon Hanselmann for spilling his own beer on it.

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There's a way doctors and nurses talk to Little that HTML Flowers builds up. Distanced phrasing and side comments create an all encompassing system of language that exist solely between patients and caregivers. Words that are never spoken are still communicated; through glances and touches, but the subtext is always that of power over the other.

The phrasing is reminiscent of adults talking about a child within their vicinity, acknowledging their presence but ignoring them through couched language. Nurses talk to patients as if they are objects needing to be moved around in a preselected order, and doctors talk to them as if they don’t exist at all, as if their every word is an automated response to a list that has to be checked off. Waivers and legalize surround these interactions so much that an apology for a botched surgery isn’t even capable of being given.

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Scans of medical paperwork mark chapter breaks in No Visitors. You can see HTML Flowers medical records, the desensitized handwriting of someone else describing his treatments, and the illustrations he chooses to put on top of them. Hands and fingers manipulating faces. Instruction manuals littered with choke holds and fish hooks. Bodies being moved around space.

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The third and final comic featured in No Visitors, Surgery, is guttural.

The way doctors talk in No Visitors takes on a new dimension when you watch Little’s eyes well up as the procedure goes on. The inhumanity of opening an interaction with asking a person to sign a waiver and ending it, after a botched surgery, with saying he legally can’t apologize stays with you after every reread.

Reaction shots of agony juxtaposed with word balloons of a doctor unwilling to acknowledge the pain he is inflicting, or that it is his fault it is being caused. A hand grasping a hospital bed sheet, a head moving left and right trying to not acknowledge the arm being torn apart by a doctor's blade, panels of a clock's hand ticking and toking as the surgery continues to move forward. Incompetence on a scale that only a close up of its victims face can convey.

The lingering silence, the sterilized smell and stillness in the air before the doctor leaves the room doesn’t seem enough punishment for the doctor, but Little doesn’t ask for an apology, just for his chart to be adjusted so it might not happen again.